The Disillusionment of “Home” in Abla Farhoud’s Au grand soleil cachez vos filles

Abstract

The Disillusionment of “Home” in Abla Farhoud’s Au grand soleil cachez vos filles Nancy M. Arenberg Born in Lebanon, Abla Farhoud is recognized as a prolific author who, at the young age of five, immigrated to Quebec with her family in the early 1950s. Over the years, she has attracted considerable critical attention as a successful playwright, but is also celebrated for her prose works in which she explores the plight of migrants, often women, who find themselves opposed to traditional cultures and values in Canada.1 Most notably, Farhoud concentrates on a Lebanese woman’s struggle to adapt to life in Montreal in Le Bonheur à la queue glissante (1998), a seminal text that places many of her literary productions within the category of écriture migrante. It is Farhoud’s focus on nomadism, identity, and problematic homecomings that establishes a connection to other migrant writers located in Montreal, such as Dany Laferrière, Régine Robin, Ying Chen, Marie-Célie Agnant, and Émile Ollivier. At a later stage of her career, Farhoud published Toutes celles que j’étais (2015), an autofictional work in which the author’s avatar, Aablè, moves to Montreal with her family as a young girl. But after fourteen years in Quebec, Aablè’s family travels to Lebanon, which sets the stage for the second novel in this projected trilogy. Farhoud’s Au grand soleil cachez vos filles (2017) reprises some key immigrant issues seen in the previous text, mainly the themes of disenfranchisement, nostalgic longing, and exile. In this work, the father of the Abdelnour clan makes the decision to repatriate the family to Lebanon, thus uprooting the children from their comfortable lifestyle in Montreal. As seen in Toutes celles que j’étais, this novel also channels many of Farhoud’s actual experiences, for the narrative is situated in the pre-civil war period of the 1960s. In fact, Farhoud did return to Lebanon at the age of twenty in 1965 but fled to France before the onset of the Six-Day War in 1967. Since the Abdelnour family’s migration emphasizes travelling across significant geographical boundaries, the first part of this article examines the complex representation [End Page 337] of the homeland, a distant mirage on the horizon. At the nexus of the family’s journey is the crisis of radical displacement, as they cross borders to arrive “over there,” but struggle to establish roots to create a sense of “home” in this unfamiliar place. To delve into this intricate notion of returning “home,” Salman Rushdie’s perspective on imaginary homelands is interpolated into the discussion in concert with Edward Said’s notion of imaginative geography. Although the narrative unfolds from the alternating viewpoints of several family members, the main part of this study focuses on the problem of disillusionment, stemming from the difficult experiences of the two older daughters, Ikram and Faïzah. Seen through a feminist lens, the overarching crisis of disillusionment is also manifested on a corporeal level. To clarify, the bodies of the two sisters demonstrate resistance, at times, to cultural traditions and norms in Lebanon. Most importantly, Farhoud concentrates on the two sisters’ struggles to assimilate into the restrictive and foreign customs of Lebanese society, a challenge for independent women accustomed to mobility, freedom, and vast opportunities in Montreal. The concluding part of this article briefly considers Farhoud’s perspective on the plight of immigrants who live in a perpetual state of exile in search of a place to call “home.” According to Sara Ahmed, “home” can be defined as a place with fixed, stable boundaries, signifying the notion of belonging. However, in migrant narratives, this conception is unattainable, as immigrants are perpetually dislocated from a place or a space to call home (see Ahmed, “Home and Away” 339). It is useful to begin this study by looking at the family’s path of migration, a key component of Farhoud’s textual production. At first glance, one of the most striking aspects of the novel is the author’s reversal of the more traditional path, often seen in Québécois migrant narratives, in which immigrants move across borders in search of better lives in the new world...